songanddancegirl

NOT PEACE

THE TIME BETWEEN WARS IS CALLED THE ABSENCE OF WAR

I am walking slowly   scorched-earth kind of day   along

Wellington towards Bay   Just passed the military cemetery

at Brant  (most of the dead under 20  4 suicides)  when I

spot Rapier Wit:  For Everyday + Acting Needs     The long

sword in the window conjures up a Musketeer   Not of the

Mickey variety   more d’Artagnan in tight tights

(www.rapierwit.com)

The heat is getting to me   Stop at Collette for iced tea   There a

tall tan girl with bright bluish teeth  +quips mixed with upspeak

She brandishes a screechy  Ya Ya Ya  repeatedly     With my rapier

I outline her mouth  as her tongue curls around its tip  +with the hand

that is not twirling hair   an aggressive bird she flips

Perhaps time to take up serpents   A surreptitious asp  well placed  might

be more effective   Take out the creepy  Trivago Man  now sidling up to me

A horror of a Monday   at 34 degrees

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End of Summer  2015

SERVE

YOU GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY

Resisting new forms  umpteenth re-birth    You mean

I must do this again?  Can I speak to the Superintendent?

Who is in charge here? an 8 yr. old boy asked me  our session

at an impasse  (No  you may not take all of your clothes off   +

Yes I’m sure your penis is nice  but it must stay in your pants)

Who is your boss?   he demanded   I don’t have a boss!   Everybody

has a boss therapist   What about God? Or is there a landlord in this

building?   28 yrs. later I can see where he was coming from   His

impotent rage laying latent  in me   at 36 in a dream  a giant skinhead

bellowed: SECOND HALF OF LIFE!   

No way to grasp what that might mean   Consulted an old Rabbi  equally

oblique:  The unconscious  is really  unconscious    I thought I detected

glee    Recently a grief-stricken friend told me  her grandmother’s brain

was seeping out   through her nose

Left me wondering what was the point of accumulating every single fucking

thing i know?   But then that is the wrong question    Can I get a witness?

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September 2015

PONTCHARTRAIN

AIN’T NOTHING HOLDING BACK PONCHARTRIAN

There is a perfect sickle-moon shaped wound  above my

right ankle   now surrounded by black+blue   Punctured

by a hunk of metal  hanging from fridge since 2002

It was the perfect storm   tanned leg picking up velocity

as upper body reaches for iced tea  Pitcher off kilter  smashes

on the floor   Metal impales summer leg   as blood+tea mingle

in perfect vampire’s brew

Anxious city dweller ruminates on flesh eating disease  until

about Wednesday   Sickle moon in soon autumn skies  waxing

to full  August 29   Tenth anniversary of the day the music died

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Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named storm and fifth hurricane

of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster,

as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States.

Total fatalities 1,833.

Summer 2015

SWORD

SOMEWHERE HE RIDES WITH A CAPE+PLUMED HAT

HIS SWORD HELD HIGH

Khaled al-Assad  preserver of Roman antiquities   Columns

rising out of the desert in Syria!  No more   Born in Palmyra

retired octogenarian  What strangefruit is he?   Now hanging

from a pole  after 3 weeks in captivity

Islamic State abhors symbols of Western idolatry   Haters with

a flair for stagecraft: orange jumpsuits  carving knives +bulldozers

This brutal execution to eradicate paganism    A new iteration of

burn the witch?   Or loot the art of now gassed prisoners?

This  Director of Idols   Convenor of Infidel Conferences  taken to

the market square  charges against him hanging from his neck   Named

his daughter Zenobia  after 3rd century Queen  directed Palmyra Museum

for forty years   6 books   leading expert on Syrian culture+treasures

Had he remained a shepherd   he would likely be under a cold moon  his

tent filled with family   Mr. al-Assad  believer in destiny  passed through

the market square daily  +often paused under the canopy  leaning against

the further most pole  a private sanctuary  Blood red sun casting shadows

at his feet

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I was born in Palmyra. And I will stay in Palmyra. And not leave even

if it costs me my blood.  Khaled al-Assad  June 2015

Summer 2015

SHOE

WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE

to drop   one neon green runner  still dangling

on wires   since freezing february day  2013   crack

house larry has moved away  also a dj   5,000 tunes

1 blaring at  all times   now american staffordshires

bark into starry nights   +there’s no drying the tears of

hot crack wife

larry bought a bungalow down the street   same car too

+look alike wife   he is friendlier these days   +we no longer

complain   tunes now raising neighbour’s roofs    yesterday

as he slouched down street  pants hanging around his knees

crack house larry whispered to me:

I’ll be your your man    poet   climb aboard!

it’s twilight now  +the last green shoe  spins in wicked breeze

as old poet muses on lighting out for new territory   black keys

moaning ceaselessly    late august in the year  twenty fifteen

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Summer   2015

REBEL

REBEL ARTIST’S  TRAGIC ENDING

Time magazine   August 11, 1956   Jackson Pollock+

young mistress   +friend Edith in back seat   Elvis on

the radio   Wraps car around tree     He was drinking

heavily   Is artist-life  all it’s cracked up to be?   His drip

paintings no longer scintillating   Critics claimed he’d:

lost his stuff

Jackson was 44  had 17 yrs. more than Jimmy  Janis +

Kurt   ditto Amy     Now I direct you to the faces of Ella

+Louis   in late middle age standing before a mic   trumpet

in hand  voice of African goddess about to be loosed  Flowered

cotton dress  striped polo shirt   Could heal the world one ear

at a time   Sublime Goddamn!   To paraphrase Miss Simone

Music the balm of Gilead   Raise you up   Set you free    At the

Opera  on Saturday  a woman with hands hacked off  as a child

up on stage    Left un-dead  atop a pile of bodies   Sierra Leone

She told of an  angelic voice +plaintive honk  snaking through the

carnage-heap    Her hands a distant memory

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If I were a psychiatrist I would recommend a poem by Baudelaire

(or the music of Ella+Louis)  to treat anguish.

(Gaston Bachelard 1884-1962  Philosopher)

Summer  2015

BUBBLING

THAT MOMENT OF BUBBLING ALCHEMY MARKED THE ENTRANCE

INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION

What was mangled?  Or more to the point  What was not mangled?

Moot   Cyclist mangled  breaking through to the otherside   Bicycle

beyond mangled   Crushed+bent+ground into pavement   Ditto helmet

Ditto pedestrian’s joie de vivre   Giant truck  fender mangled   Smaller car

tangled around itself   Glass+organic matter  everywhere   Cyclist will no

longer need glasses in his dreams

On Sunday  a 5 yr. old boy  said to me: do you wear glasses in the shower?

do you wear glasses to sleep?  dead people don’t need glasses in their dreams

He is something of a mystic  dolorous eyes+wizard’s grin  says he wants to be

an accountant   Just moments before that crash  I fingered fall finery   local

haberdashery   Heat wave breaking records worldwide   45 in Abu Dhabi  some

combusting spontaneously

They say the Rapture is heralded by fire+brimstone  Horoscope says: you will be 

redeemed  by writhing carnality   Sounds semi-rapturous to me   Young clerk in

store gazes into my eyes   You remind me of the ginger in American Horror Story

His colleague twitters  My smile grows crocodile  When they burned her at the stake

she screamed  Balenciaga!    Do people say this shit to you?

As a hellbent scribe  one becomes the ear    ear in the gutter  ear in the sky    There

is a 5,000 yr.old language  Cuneiform  The word for wisdom  is ear   After the crash

there were no sounds to hear   Tomorrow  imaginary chains  dragging behind the new

ghost  +tears evaporating  where Queen meets Beverly

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Summer 2015

FICTION

DIALECTICS OF A RETROSPECTIVELY CONSTRUCTED FICTION

outside the inside    the familiar +wet   without warning   low tide

now into a series of houses   gimme the illusion of shelter    in a

607 page tome   a girl is born over+over again   on a february day

in 1910   lives through 2 wars   dies in the blitz    4 times or more

carnage in London   crawls across a sludgey baby   in bomb shelter

clothes blown off of bodies   ½ a woman hangs from rafters  in a

flowered dress   some physicists say reality is all in the mind   a self

scripted creation    are all acts of: promising   praying   marrying   self

performances?   if so what are the moral implications?

it is highly likely mathematically  that we perform this life repetitively

in a palimpsest of identity   in the book she suicides purposefully  in order

to be reborn +kill Adolph   remembering bits of former selves  in murky

déjà vu     what would you undo?

tonight there will be a Perseid meteor shower   a ladder will appear over

the hot-tub   you can escape the longslide   but you must go alone   today

a boy told me he’s writing a story about a man   who after a mishap   is

trapped in a spaceship  bound for Mars    it’s about lonliness

I ask: 1) was he lonely before he boarded the ship?   2) will that help him

with the long red days of Martian solitude?   He isn’t sure   He smiles+winks

+his freckles form a sentence:  Poet!   take the ladder

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(it is a fact that depressed individuals are known to await the apocalypse in

a state of dead calm)

Late Summer  2015

TISSUE

A HIGHLY COMPLICATED CRESCENT OF TISSUE

curls around the centre of the brain  the striatum  some

call it  the villain    desire central     commander of the

dopamine-pump   human cocaine   crashing through veins

we share these  deeply wrapped  parts of the brain with lower

animals   going all the way back to fish

desire   the cry of a soul calling for attention  obliquely   but

obstinately   pursuing what it hungers for   like an iceberg

laying in wait   in the depths of the collective   power   mammon  

sex   world domination      a blind guide    commandeering the self

tests with rodents have confirmed much of this    who is with us?

who is against us?   kill what we fear   this week in  kinjia india

villagers dragged 5 women witches out of their homes +beat them

to death  with iron rods    50 people were arrested

Once the desire circuitry is lit up  it becomes more+more difficult to

find the off switch   until there isn’t one   amok abounds   a child sized

robot is left for dead in a philly gutter  leading to an outpouring of grief

while human children are not safe in yards  laneways   certain schools +

choirs     the earth means something different now

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Summer 2015

STRAD

HE BOUGHT ME A STRAD (IVARIUS)

An entire Park   20 hectares   A not bad looking

bloke asks: Mind if I share that bench?   I give

him my most demanding deathstare   Had I Darth’s

sabre he would be a headless cyclist   Bike leaning

against hundred yr. old tree   Bloke cozies up to me

There is a squirrel with an orange face +underbelly

It too is creeping closer   Turns out bloke reeks of BEER

+has an oozing sore on his leg

Once  before I sat in parks  +freezing cafes  earning an unliving

There was a man who bought me a Strad   at a silent auction

Another woman might have learned to play  or at least strummed

it on occasion   I preferred to keep it sheathed   +counted other

women in my sleep    Sheep to the un-sheathed slaughter

Was Stradivari a cad too?  Thousands of violins have been made

with his imprint   Most are copies   When the real artifact comes

along one would hope for a working bullshit meter  +at least some

facility with wind instruments  if not violins

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Late Summer 2015